Ikalogic life

For the past few years, we've seen - from time to time - users adding something like a million marker to a ScanaStudio workspace. Why would someone do that? If you have ever tried to invent your own custom protocol (or work with a proprietary communication protocol) you'll most probably see why. If not, well, it's quite simple: To debug your custom protocol, you have to calculate the "meaning" of transmitted data at the very low level of "bits". Just like the old days, grabbing a piece of paper and aligning zeros and ones. In that situation, markers may helps you to separate bits.

Some time ago, we have decided to break with the past, and raise the quality of our products to higher standards. This came at a time when ScanaPlus-x (the successor of ScanaPLUS) was almost ready for production. In this blog post, I'll be explaining some of the technical details that made us reconsider the launch of the product.

Even if all devices are perfectly in sync at (and around) the trigger instant, each device has its internal quartz, its own PLL that generates the sampling clock. That also means that each device has its own clock deviation. While this deviation is typically below 5%, the problem is that it's totally random, and the farther you get from the trigger instant, the less signal edges are correctly aligned between different devices.

...And don't get me started on all the mistakes I've made. Some of you may have been frustrated by software not being updated or bugs not being fixed, and trust me, I was as frustrated as you, if not more. But things are not that easy. Even a very small company is a rather big ship, and steering it to another direction is not always something you can do as quickly as you'd hope. Trust me. But again: I learnt. I learnt big time.